Posts by matt

Forget The Atlantic Monthly. All the real journalism is happening on The Daily Show (RealPlayer req’d). (Via Atrios.)

From “More Reefer Madness,” by Eric Schlosser, The Atlantic:

In California thirty-one state and federal drug agents raided Donald P. Scott’s 200-acre Malibu ranch on the pretext that marijuana was growing there. Scott was inadvertently killed during the raid. No evidence of marijuana cultivation was discovered, and a subsequent investigation by the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office found that the drug agents had been motivated partly by a desire to seize the $5 million ranch.

If you haven’t read the article that begat the book, give it a whirl. It’s a catalogue of hypocrisy, futility, ruined lives, and government corruption, all borne out of an initiative that cost $10 billion for law enforcement in 2003, and $19 billion overall (PDF).

So far, in 2003, 50,342 people have been arrested as part of the War on Drugs, reports the War On Drugs Clock. Oh wait, make that 50,346. Almost half of these arrests are for marijuana offenses. “More people are now incarcerated in the nation’s prisons for marijuana than for manslaughter or rape,” said Eric Schlosser in 1997.

Just sayin’.

Do you think people who’ve never heard of a blog actually find this article interesting?

The linked journals also form a community, an intriguing, unchecked experiment in silent group therapy — a hive mind in which everyone commiserates about how it feels to be an outsider, in perfect choral unison.

Well isn’t that poignant.

Really, what is the New York Times Magazine‘s target audience? I’m more and more beginning to suspect it’s a group of time travelers from half a year ago, curious about what cultural developments have transpired in the interim. Next week in the NYTM: What is a “metrosexual”?

UPDATE: There’s some quality snark about this article flying over on MetaFilter. Sample:

“It was early September, the start of the school year in an affluent high school in Westchester County, just north of New York City, where I was focusing my teen-blogging expedition. The halls were filled with students and the walls were covered with posters urging extracurricular activities. (”Instant popularity, minus the hazing,” read one.) I had come looking for J., a boy I’d never seen, though I knew many of the details of his life.” – Such the brave anthropologist, this Nussbaum, hacking her way with a machete through the dense tropical jungles which encircle NYC, to dare to meet the exotic, tribalistic young savages of the Westchester County suburbs!

She’s lucky that these bone-in-the-nose primitives did not just throw her into a big kettle and boil her for dinner.

At a moment when every profile of Howard Dean seems to be trying to define the man, it’s nice to read an article that’s content to just describe him.

A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies. From Harper’s. Via MetaFilter.

I could comment on this article as being another repudiation of the CW that a monolithic group of Clinton insiders — and thus somehow Clinton himself — is dead set against Howard Dean, but I want to focus instead on the very last thing in the article. Check out the e-mail address Sidney Blumenthal gave to the Guardian. Yes, that’s right: Sidney_Blumenthal@yahoo.com.

Do you mean to tell me that the right-hand man of the former American president and current Godfather of the Democratic party can not find an e-mail address more fitting his station than a ghetto free Yahoo account? I mean, Sid. Come on. SBlumenthal.com is totally not taken. And it looks like SidneyBlumenthal.com has been registered by a D.C. consultant (with, I might add, an only slightly less ghetto AOL address… dodgy!), whose kneecaps I’m sure you can have broken if he’s not authorized to use your name or likeness or whatever.

I mean, I’m pretty certain that any e-mail addressed to Sidney_Blumenthal@yahoo.com would receive a reply from Mailer-Daemon@LeadersOfTheFreeWorld.net entitled “Hapless Peon, Your Request for Communication Has Been Denied; Prepare to Die,” but still, that is like the lamest calling card ever.

I toyed with “Making Medicare Mediclear” as a title, so be happy with what you got.

Anyhoo, I’ve been known to occasionally advance the completely unfounded assertion that Ruy Teixeira only got where he is by telling liberals exactly what they want to hear. But he’s taken some strong strides towards accomplishing something I’ve been loudly pining for for some time now — writing a readable, interesting article about Medicare.

There’s a little eye-glazing that happens during his big numbers graf, but pound for pound, this piece pretty clearly lays out the problems seniors are currently having with this bill, that the deductibles, premiums, coverage gaps, and co-pays spotted all over the bill’s 600+ pages mean that it doesn’t help the average senior all that much:

The average drug spending by Medicare beneficiaries is projected to be about $3,250 in 2006, when the benefit takes effect. Under the bill just passed, a beneficiary will wind up having to pay 70 percent of this typical drug bill.

The rest of Donkey Rising, Teixeira’s “WebLog,” looks to have some pretty good stuff also. Check it out.

… apply it to Howard Dean anyway.

A few days ago, I dismissed this New Republic article as an evidence-lacking, context-destroying, Pickler-esque, and pretty-much-instantly-debunked attempt at creating a new DeanMeme

http://www.mominthemirror.com/

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